Silentkid Reviews The Happening
Am I allowed to review a movie that I didn’t finish watching, a movie that pushed me out of the theatre 30 minutes after it started, a movie so amazingly boring that I was willing to eat the $7.50 I paid for admittance? Yes, I am. My $7.50 investment entitles me to review said movie. Said move = The Happening. The Happening = poop. I paid $7.50 for poop. I can drop my own dumpage for free. I can find poop on the lawn outside my apartment and step in it and smear it on my carpet and I don’t have to pay a penny.
I was pretty excited to see The Happening after I watched the red band trailer on the internet. M. Night Shyamalan makes an R-rated movie with lots of gore starring Marky Mark and Bones’ sister (the TV show Bones, not the Snoop Dogg movie) who I used to think was kind of cute but now I’m not so sure. The trailer shows people falling off of buildings, people stabbing themselves in the neck, people getting run over by riding lawnmowers, etc. Color me stoked. Then I got to the theatre. When the movie started, I was the only person there. After a few minutes, a couple of other people wandered in. I quickly noticed that there was something wrong with the sound. The supposedly pristine Dolby Digital soundtrack was oscillating from side to side accompanied by a low level hiss that sounded like wind in a tunnel. I don’t think this was the fault of the film; there was something wrong with the AMC theatre equipment. Good sound is as important as a good picture. I paid decent money for this movie. I expect better sound than I can get on my home theatre set-up. I left the theatre (after about 30 minutes into the movie) to tell the service desk about the problem but instead of returning to finish the movie, I went home. I had no interest in discovering what else happened in The Happening because nothing had happened up to the point when I bailed. That’s not totally true. Some stuff had happened. I got to see lots of extreme close-ups of John Leguizamo’s face and nasty, crooked yellow teeth. He wore a constant expression of sadness and befuddlement. I got to see Marky Mark play the worst impersonation of a biology teacher ever put to film. Completely unbelievable. I like Mark Wahlberg; he’s great in Shooter and The Departed and Fear and Four Brothers and such. He’s terrible in this (at least in the first half-hour). I got to see extreme close-ups of Zooey Deschanel’s face, her close-set, nearly crossed eyes and her I-have-no-idea-where-the-fuck-I-am expression. I was privileged to witness a discussion about the merits of the hot dog and questions concerning the availability of mustard. The hot dog dialogue was my breaking point. I stood up and promptly exited the theatre, walked to the service desk where I notified the 16 year-old of the sound issues, and left the AMC 24 complex. I got in my car and drove home. I put my new Gangs of New York BluRay in my Sony PlayStation 3 and cleansed my mind of all things M. Night. Goodnight M. Night. See you on DTV soon.
4 comments:
Some people just don't understand, I'm not going to scream genius at this flick, but the acting was just completely, simply, overbearingly, and so uniquely different. I felt afterwards like I had just watched a film by a Hitchcock-Lynch bastard child. I knew something was quite off about the acting, and I know M. Night can get what he wants from an actor, you don't just forget, so I gave it more thought, and you know... He was telling more story with the WAY the peeps on screen said stuff, than what they were actually saying. The use of extremes in voicing to tell a story is very Lynch, if you've seen Twin Peaks remember the Red Room? Those words didn't make a gosh darn bit of sense, but the WAY they said them made more of an impact in the end than anything. In The Happening, he's painting these actors to be children. Mood rings, scary principles, staring bewildered at the horror of an incoming text, these are not the habits or actions of a pair of grown adults, so when at the end they mature, face their fears, and become aware of their surroundings, they grow up. And the rest of the story can take a leap off a tall building and commit suicide because it's all a rouse. This is the story of growing up, masked by terror, cheesy effects, and a B-Movie script. And so many people missed out.
I get what you're saying about the adults being portrayed as children...that makes sense, in retrospect. Here's my issue: gimmicky filmmaking is fine with me, but only if the film is entertaining beyond the gimmick. Lynch infuses his films with so much atmosphere and weirdness that they work. This film lacked both those qualities. It's just not strange enough. I've been a Shyamalan apologist ever since Signs. I even liked Lady in the Water. Unless he does something drastically different with his next movie, I'll be skipping out.
yeah... i agree there just wasn't enough, and like you said Lynch just gives it so much character and holy crap to keep you going. I felt like I was having to do most of the work, not the best, at all.
I've never watched a David Lynch or Hitchcock film and tried to reason why the acting was so bad (let alone attribute it to a hidden geniusness that nobody gets. HA!) Whether M. Night was trying to be like Lynch or HItchcock is pointless because he didn't even come close. Frankly, I'd rather not mention Lynch and Hitchcock in the same sentence with M. Night anymore because they really don't belong together. The whole B-Movie excuse has got to be a cover up story thought up by his publicists after the initial reviews. I just don't see it.
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